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BRICKWALL HD User Manual
6.6 Modern Mastering, Loudness and
True-Peaks
The BRICKWALL HD is highly suitable for the mastering process, with many ways
to make your mix sound better, but if not used wisely, there are many ways of
making it sound worse!
There is a risk of becoming speed-blind in the tuning process, and at first prefer
an over-compressed and loud-sounding track. This is a situation that can be
avoided by:
• •
Knowing your music genre deeply
• • Using relevant reference tracks for comparison
• • Ensuring calibrated monitoring levels
• • Using an optimized monitoring environment
The resulting Loudness and Dynamic Compression are two of the most important
properties of a track, adjusted finally in mastering. These two properties can be
regarded as counterparts to each other. In other words, it is important to:
• • Decide how loud your tracks should be
• • Design the dynamic profile of your music
Due to the fixed 0 dBFS ceiling, louder tracks have less dynamics, and “weaker”
tracks will potentially have more dynamics.
We recommend that you do not hyper-compress and limit your tracks to the
extreme in the mastering process, in order to achieve a loud track. If you overdo
it, it will reduce the audio quality of your work. And often, there is even a penalty
in playback stages so your loud track may end up sounding weaker, rather than
louder.
6.6.1 Loudness
The Loudness approach to music mastering is based upon similar methods
introduced more than a decade ago by the industry producing audio for TV.
Loudness measures how loud we actually hear audio, which is different from
“level” PPM meters that look at transients only. The Loudness method includes
K-filtering that emulates human hearing, where bass affects the perceived
loudness level less, and where frequencies from approximately 2 kHz and up
affect the perceived loudness level more.
Loudness is a modern, but still well-rehearsed reference method, which is
standardized in BS-1770, and many music streaming services refer to this
standard, or similar proprietary methods.
Loudness is measured on the LUFS metering scale. LUFS stands for "Loudness
Units Full Scale." The scale does not measure sound as a dB meter or a VU meter
would. Rather, it accounts for how the human ear (and brain) perceives the
loudness of a track. That is also why there is only one loudness value or level,
instead of one per channel.
Loudness examples: Some Streaming Services will aim for -16 LUFS loudness
when they play back music tracks with “Sound Check” enabled. The AES
community recommend streaming music between -20 and -16 LUFS. Often
you will see songs that measure -14, -12, -10 or even -8 LUFS and it will vary for
example by music genre.
6.6.2 True Peak
Often, there can be small peaks of sound in-between digital samples, inter-
sample peaks, that go undetected in digital tools including our MASTER X HD.
Where traditional peak meters and conventional peak limiters fail to read those
true peaks of sound, a True Peak meter will provide the mastering engineer with
the actual reading.
Without a True Peak meter and True-Peak Limiter especially, a mastered track
could go into digital clipping when converted to a lossy format like MP3 or AAC
or when being Digital-to-Analog converted in normal playback systems. This can
happen, even if no distortion is heard when monitoring the final master.
For a modern, versatile and trustworthy mastering chain, we recommend the
BRICKWALL HD True-Peak Limiter is inserted after the MASTER X HD to ensure
elimination of the potential and problematic inter-sample peaks in your final
master track.
6.6.3 Beware of The Loudness Wars
An important note on loudness, is that there has been a trend in mastering
toward making songs appear louder and louder. Since you can never exceed
the 0dBFS digital ceiling, applying a brickwall Limiter at the final stage, the
result often has been to apply very aggressive settings on dynamics tools such
as multiband compressors, so-called ‘loudness optimizers’, as well as the final
Brickwall Limiter itself. This phenomenon has been referred to as ‘The Loudness
Wars’.
This escalated because we naturally perceive a louder version of a song to be
better than a softer version, when you compare them directly. Another cause is
that record industry people would compare an ‘airplay’ version of one track to a
newly mastered CD track, where the former tended to sound louder and fatter
due to FM broadcast processing – leading to a request to make the master louder,
with more cowbell. Well, the ‘wars’ may have peaked, but it is still something
that you should be aware of and pay attention to. And while we say that they
may have peaked, they are not completely over…
Further, if you apply extreme amounts of compression, distortion occurs, which
may lead to listening fatigue for you as well as your audience. Of course, the
amount of compression that you can use in order to fit a certain music genre can
vary, but just stay aware of how it affects your music, and act accordingly.
It is also very important that you always listen to your own mastering project and
your reference library at the same loudness level when you compare them. There
is no doubt that while a heavily compressed song – dynamically speaking – may
sound more impactful at first, you will sacrifice detail and nuance.
Finally and as mentioned above, keep in mind that the current trend in music
streaming is a target loudness of approximately -16 LUFS, so if you deliver a
significantly louder song, it will get turned down automatically if the listener
chooses to apply the ‘normalization’ feature such as ‘SoundCheck’ or ‘Same Level’
that aligns the loudness of the songs in the library. And if that happens, your very
loud song may well end up sounding much less impressive than the competition!